Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Danger Zone!

It's actually a little poignant, because the neighborhood in question is full of great, big decaying Victorian houses, a third of which are abandoned and falling in and a small number of which are frozen in the process of being fixed up, the urban pioneers of gentrification having been cut off and surrounded in Injun Country when the housing market Conestoga threw an economic wheel.

I remember going to Saginaw once, oh in the early 90's probably. My dad and I were looking for an army navy surplus store downtown. We got there in the middle of the day on a Saturday and there was no-one around. It was absolutely Twilight Zone-Rod's gonna pop out from around the corner spooky.

The wife & I moved into a decayed neighborhood back in 1990 in Baltimore, and unknowingly started a gentrification revival on our block when we restored an abandoned 12' x 24' flower bed on the grassy area across from our row houses.

My wife had started growing flowers in the backyard of our rowhouse, and was wildly successful because the previous owners had rabbit hutches there for about a decade, and merely thinking about plants from the back door made things grow there.

When the 8' tall delphiniums and the 4' tall purple cone flowers in the back yard filled the available 160 square feet, she insisted we plant the greenspace flower bed, which consisted of the 50 year old remains of a wood border and weedy grass that the city mowed once or twice a summer.

I bribed the city mulch center manager with a 6 pack of cold Cokes to get all the mulch we wanted for fill (about 18 filled 42 gallon trash bins, transported in the trunk of my Honda Civic one at a time) and used rail ties, nailed to the ground with rebar, to make the border.

We had neighbors ask us what we thought we were doing, messing with city property like that, and other neighbors who didn't want us making an attractive nuisance near them (really!) and old ladies from down the street who showed us pictures of the flower bed in the 1950s.

The flowers, grown in pure composted leaf humus, were spectacular. We had people driving by to take pictures, kids stealing a bloom or two for their girlfriends, and a copycat who did the same thing at the far end of the block.

Within two years we had a neighborhood instead of a slum. All because my wife liked flowers.

Only 2 in Memphis. They touch, though, which makes sense to me. Spent a three days in one of 'em a few weeks back, playing victim (and occasional shooter) for an Active Shooter scenario for the benefit of local LE and FD people. Certainly looked like one of the worst neighborhoods in America. I can see why an abandoned warehouse was available for our use.

FBI data is submitted by the states if I recall correctly. It wasn't murder, being out after 6 PM on that street was suicide.

Anywhere using compstats is going to have wonky numbers too.

And the reason I would guess high rise tenements don't show up would be related to a problem reporting crime more than crime not actually happening. There is a reason cities are tearing those down, and a reason violent crime in Chicago spread out when everyone got housing vouchers.

@Aaron: Notice that they're all in one corner of the state. (Although some spots in Grand Rapids and Muskegon Heights might come close to making the list.) And that if that southeast less-than-a-quarter of Michigan was it's own (very blue) state, MI would be a red state, maybe even as red as Texas.